was also silly. Their garden was
Anna Osk lifted up her pony to the window to look at the garden. Her bedroom was on the second floor, high up, and she had a good view. She could see exactly where you could put a stable, right in the corner where the little tree was. Easy-peasy.
As she was planning the exact positioning of the structure, Anna Osk noticed some movement in the next-door garden. Someone was crawling through the bushes at the back. It was a man. He was really difficult to see, but Anna Osk could tell it wasn’t the man who lived in the house next door. She wondered if he was playing hide-and- seek.
He must have been because he crawled right up to the neighbour’s car, which was parked at the top of the driveway, and then slid until he was halfway underneath.
Anna Osk looked around for a child. As a rule, grown-ups didn’t play hide-and-seek by themselves. She couldn’t see one, but she was sure there must be one somewhere. Probably at the front of the house, the man was well hidden from the front or the road.
Very strange. She would tell her mummy what she had seen.
‘Anna Osk!’ Her mother’s voice crashed up the stairs. This didn’t sound good.
‘Anna Osk, come downstairs this minute! How many times have I told you to pick up your toys from the kitchen floor when you have finished playing? I’ve had enough! No TV this afternoon, do you hear me?’
Anna Osk began to cry.
Magnus pulled up outside the wooden police station in Grundarfjordur and stepped out of the Range Rover.
‘Magnus!’
He turned to see the burly figure of Pall in his black uniform walking rapidly towards him from the direction of the harbour.
‘That was quick,’ Pall said.
‘Not much traffic.’
Pall smiled.
‘Any trace of Bjorn?’ Magnus asked.
‘None so far. No one has seen him for a couple of days in the harbour. It’s unlikely he took a boat out: certainly no one saw him if he did. The harbourmaster said he would check whether any small boats were missing that hadn’t been reported. I stopped in quickly to talk to his parents and his sister. They say they haven’t heard anything from him either. Same at the cafe the fishermen often use. The police in Stykkisholmur and Olafsvik are looking for him too. They’ve set up road blocks on every route out of the peninsula.’
That at least was possible: there were no more than a couple of routes out of the Snaefells Peninsula. But the peninsula itself was big, perhaps eighty kilometres long and fifteen wide, and full of mountains. Impossible to search thoroughly.
Magnus wondered about a helicopter. But although sun shone along the shoreline, the mountains themselves were enveloped in cloud.
Of course if Bjorn had left the area the night before he could be over the other side of Iceland by now. But if he was planning to hide Harpa he might choose somewhere he knew. Somewhere close to home.
‘So what’s next?’
‘I thought shops and petrol stations,’ said Pall. ‘He may have stocked up with supplies or fuel. There aren’t many of them in town: do you want to split up or come with me?’
‘Let’s do it together,’ Magnus said. ‘You know the town and the people. I’ll just waste time.’
‘Good,’ said Pall moving towards his white police car. ‘Jump in. And you can tell me what’s really going on.’
Isak drove his mother’s poor Honda off what was left of the track, and round the back of a large conical rock. Miraculously the axle didn’t break. He scuffed the tyre marks in the dirt with his foot. He didn’t want Bjorn to notice the car should he decide to drive back up the pass.
He took the knife he had bought in Borgarnes out of the plastic bag and thrust it into the pocket of his coat. Then he crept back to the boulder. The hut was about two hundred metres from where the road emerged into the open. There was virtually no cover, but only one of the windows in the hut faced that way, and that was high up, probably a little higher than eye level.
He noticed that the cloud was thickening and creeping down the walls of the valley.
On the other side of the building was a cliff about thirty metres high, with a waterfall cascading down it. There seemed to be a vertical crevice in the rock there big enough for a man to squeeze and still have a view of the hut.
Isak gave it a try. He ran, crouching, around the hut, keeping himself out of the field of vision of the bigger windows at the side of the building. He pressed himself into the crevice. His view of the hut was indeed clear, and he was pretty sure that Bjorn wouldn’t be able to see him. The only problem was that water from the cascade was constantly splashing on to him, and it was cold. Very cold.
He would wait until Bjorn left the hut again. Then he would slip inside and deal with Harpa. Wait until Bjorn came back and as he discovered her body, slash a tyre of Bjorn’s truck and run up the road to his own car.
Leave it to Bjorn to dispose of Harpa’s body.
But then, if Bjorn was subsequently caught, which he probably would be, he would talk.
No. Isak would just have to kill Bjorn as well as Harpa. Either wait until Bjorn left the hut and surprise him when he returned, or if Bjorn didn’t leave, creep into the hut after night fell and they were both asleep. If Isak wasn’t frozen to death by then.
It wasn’t ideal, but he was committed now.
Magnus waited in the car as Pall went into Samkaup, the main supermarket in town. He called Baldur and told him that there was no sign of Bjorn. He had already passed on Sharon’s message about Isak’s disappearance.
Baldur was businesslike. Sindri wasn’t talking. Not a word. Wasn’t even bothering with a lawyer. Magnus wasn’t surprised. If there was one more hit still to come, Sindri would be happy to bide his time.
Arni had checked with Isak’s parents. Isak had left home at nine o’clock the previous evening in his mother’s car, a small Honda, loaded with camping stuff. She said that the family had been on a number of camping trips to Thorsmork, a hundred and fifty kilometres to the east of Reykjavik.
They had struck lucky. Calling around campsites, they had discovered that Isak had been spotted at a site near Hveragerdi, to the south-east of Reykjavik, on the way to Thorsmork. Although Baldur and Magnus agreed that Isak wasn’t going on a little holiday jaunt, it was possible that if he was looking for wilderness to hide in, he might choose an area with which he was familiar.
Or he might be in the Snaefells Peninsula with Bjorn and Harpa.
Magnus suggested that they pull Gulli in. Perhaps somehow he had travelled from Tenerife to London and Paris and then back to Tenerife. Unlikely, but they didn’t want to take any chances: if he was in custody he couldn’t assassinate anyone. Baldur agreed. He had given up condemning Magnus’s wilder ideas. The stakes were too high.
Pall returned to the car. ‘Nothing. Let’s go on.’
Grundarfjordur was a small, compact town and it didn’t take long for Pall to get from place to place. They checked Vinbud, the state liquor store, and then went on to the petrol station.
The kid behind the counter knew Bjorn Helgason but hadn’t seen him since he had filled up his red pickup the morning of the day before.
‘That was probably to get down to Reykjavik,’ Magnus said. As an afterthought, just as he was leaving, he paused.
‘You haven’t seen a young guy in here have you? A student, twenty-two years old, neatly dressed, about one seventy-five tall, fair hair, little dimple on his chin? Driving a small blue Honda?’
‘Yes,’ said the kid. ‘A guy like that was in here about an hour ago. Asked me where a mountain pass was with a hut. I told him about the Kerlingin Pass. He’d never even heard of the troll. Can you believe it? These guys from Reykjavik don’t know anything.’
